Much has been said about how important it is for Facebook to successfully monetize in the mobile space. Advertising in an app is a double-edged sword that yields seemingly free money on the one side but may lead to long-term disengagement from users. At the end of the day, deciding on the amount of advertising in an app requires a very delicate balance to be maintained.
Today, I saw something in the Facebook iOS app that was definitely not balanced:
In my opinion, this experience as bad for the end user for two reasons:
- The entire screen of the user’s view is taken up by ads
- This was the first thing that was shown upon entry into the app
In an ideal user experience, there would be some smarter logic that would spread out ads across the different news feed stories so that the user is never bombarded with so many ads at once that they don’t get anything resembling what they were looking for in the first place.
Azad Zahoory 